The current invention is a vehicle, adapted to travel on land, indoors or outdoors, for the explicit purpose of carrying a hockey equipment bag and related accessories. It falls under the United States Patent Class 280, Land Vehicles, in the Subclass 47.24 which refers to tiltable vehicles which have wheel; spaced apart laterally from the direction of movement of the vehicle and are stabilized by an attendant by which a force can be applied through a handle means to propel it.
Due to the nature of the game of hockey, a lot of equipment is required to play. This includes skates, shin pads, hockey pants, elbow pads, shoulder pads, helmet and gloves. This equipment is heavy and bulky and is usually carried in a large bag over one's shoulder while the opposite hand carries the player's sticks. This leaves no hands free for opening doors or for carrying anything else. Also, the bags are often longer than most doors are wide, causing additional problems when carried over the shoulder. The disclosed invention eliminates this awkwardness by encompassing all of the equipment into one compact, rolling system.
The only known example of prior art exists with U.S. Pat. No. 5,797,612 (Buccioni) which consists of a complete, rigid, hockey equipment container on wheels. The down sides of this carrier are as follows: firstly, one must purchase this rigid, complex, container even if the person already has a hockey equipment bag, which because of its intricacies can be very expensive. Secondly, the design calls for sticks to be secured in the container by the blade end, which means that a separate carrier would be required for goaltenders (whose stick blades are much larger and of a different shape). Thirdly, because of the large, rigid nature of this previous design, the bag cannot conform to interior automobile spaces in the way that a flexible bag can. It is designed to mount on the exterior of an automobile, which can make equipment cold and uncomfortable to wear. One final shortcoming of this design is that there is no lockable compartment for valuables and no provision for locking the carrier to a stationary object for security. All of these shortcomings are eliminated with the present invention.